What Wallowing in White Guilt
Is Good for

October 18,
2007

[Originally published by Creators Syndicate,
October 5, 2004]

It
must have been a tough
decision for the editors of the Washington Post last
week whether to lead on page one with the return of baseball to the District
of Columbia or the story about the demonstration in Annapolis to
acknowledge white guilt for slavery. As it turned out, the editors went with
baseball, but the slavery-guilt wallow was at least the lead of the Metro
section. Nothing quite beats white guilt, I guess, unless its baseball.

In fact, the Annapolis guilt wallow beat just about anything most white
people could imagine. Calling itself A Slavery Reconciliation Walk of
Penitence and Forgiveness, the event attracted a whopping 24
participants, 11 of them children, according to the Washington
Times account. Actually, all of them were children, but leave that
aside.

The wallowers, the white ones anyway, draped themselves in chains
and placards acknowledging their guilt for slavery, and wore T-shirts with the
words So Sorry and armbands labeled penitent.
Black participants wore armbands with the word forgiver.
This tells you what sort of reconciliation the wallowers had in
mind.

If it doesnt, white wallower Carol Palmer, a 38-year-old child in
tears over her guilt, made it clear. I am a descendant of a slave
owner, she blubbered, and I thought this would be a way of
acknowledging the injustice and for others to see that I am truly sorry for
the actions of my forefathers. Miss Palmer was confined in a
yoke with three other white persons, the Times
reported.

The guiltfest was sponsored by an organization calling itself the
Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation and Lifeline Expedition,
after the late black writer who cranked out the book Roots
back in the 1970s, a work purporting to explore the authors racial
heritage in Africa and early America but which was later shown to have been
mostly fabrication. The expedition that showed up in
Annapolis last week has held similar events in several European
cities, the Times says.

Today we are here to show that we in Annapolis have the will to
take persistent steps toward applying chemotherapy to that cancer,
racism, proclaimed Leonard Blackshear, the groups president.
Apparently he has nothing better to do than traipse around the world
flagellating himself and whoever else will submit to it, and from the sympathy
the Post exuded, maybe its worth it.

The march comes during a troubled period for race relations in
Anne Arundel County, the Post fretted. A
series of racially tinged incidents over the past few years has raised
concerns among government officials and community leaders. Those
concerns range from white opposition to a new black college
in the county to the distribution of alleged neo-Nazi flyers at
a local high school. Nobody seems to worry about the possibility of
racially tinged incidents involving black racism
against whites. That, you see, is not what reconciliation is
about.

Reconciliation
recalls the similar initiative peddled by President Bill Clinton some years ago,
when he too traipsed around the country (and even to Africa) to wallow in
white guilt. Such wallows have become a regular institution for whites these
days, and they always reveal the same underlying pattern of assumptions.

Assumption One is that only whites have anything to feel guilty about.
The eagerness of black African chiefs to sell their own men, women, and
children into bondage to whoever could fork up enough beads and bullets is
never mentioned.

Assumption Two is that only the evil that whites are said
to have committed is important. The fact that it was whites who outlawed
and suppressed the slave trade is also forgotten, as is the fact that slavery
endures in Africa to this day  on a massive scale.

And Assumption Three is that slavery was and is totally evil 
despite the fact that almost all civilizations have practiced it, that major
philosophers and religious figures have defended it, and that, in the absence
of slavery, most Africans (and indeed many Middle Easterners and
Europeans, whose ancestors often experienced slavery under one empire of
the past or another) would still be living in savagery.

The guilt wallow was right about one thing. Whites did indeed practice
slavery, whether as Greeks, Romans, Americans, Englishmen, or other
Europeans. You dont have to approve of slavery to see that they did
so because they shared a deep and unshakeable faith in their own race and
civilization, a faith that created and sustained their will to conquer the world.

The real reason we have to put up with the kind of guilt wallow that
slopped around in Annapolis last week is that whites today have lost that
faith in themselves. Wallowing in guilt and phony reconciliation
that barely masks an anti-white agenda is a good way to make sure they
never recover it again.

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